“I hope you’re not going to turn into a lawyer in the home,” said George. “I was using a figure of speech.”
He locked the car, and ushered his son before him into the dining-room of The Flying Horse. They found a table in a corner, and settled purposefully over the menu. Bad timing, thought Dominic, vexed. I shall have to come right out and ask.
“Are you on to anything yet?” The ardent face, the earnest eyes, these would pass muster with George; it was Dominic himself who suffered, making this enforced use of a travesty of something so real and so important to him. His father was wonderful, and he did feel a passionate partisan interest in any case his father was handling. But here he was putting on the appropriate face for his own ends, parodying his own adoration, and it caused him an almost physical pain when George grinned affectionately at him, and slapped him down only very gently.
“Just routine, Dom. We’ve hardly begun, there’s a long way to go yet.”
“Who was it you had to see in Church Lane? There aren’t any suspects there, are there?”
After a moment of consideration George said calmly: “I’d been to see Miss Norris. Just as I told you, pure routine. I’m working my way through a whole list of people who were on the premises last night, that’s all.”
“And no real leads yet? I don’t suppose she was able to tell you much, was she?”
“Practically nothing I didn’t know already. Get on with your lunch and stop trying to pump me.”
And that was all he was going to get, for all his careful manipulations. He tried once or twice more, but he knew it was no good. And maybe there was nothing more to extract, maybe this was literally all. But Dominic wasn’t happy. How could he be, with murder passing so close to Kitty that its shadow came between her and the sun?
CHAPTER V.
“Yes,” said Jean Armiger, “I’ve heard the news. It’s in the noon papers, you know. I’ve been expecting you.”
She was a slender dark girl, with short black hair clustering closely round a bold, shapely head. Her face was short, broad and passionate, and her spirit was high. She couldn’t be more than twenty-three or twenty-four. She stood squarely in the middle of her ugly, inconvenient furnished bed-sitting-room on the second floor of Mrs. Harkness’s seedy house in a back street on the edge of town, facing George and the full light from the window, and scared of neither. The slight thickening of her body beneath the loose blue smock had robbed her of her quick-silver lightness and precision of movement, but its unmistakable qualities were there in every motion she made with her hands and head. For some reason, perhaps because Kitty had a way of dimming everyone else around her, George hadn’t expected anyone as attractive as this, or as vivid. Jean, as Wilson had said, was quite a girl. It wasn’t so difficult, after all, to see how Leslie Armiger might contrive to notice her existence, even in Kitty’s presence. He had grown up on brotherly terms with Kitty.
“You’ll understand, I’m sure, that we have routine inquiries to make. Were you at home last night, Mrs. Armiger?”
She curled a lip at the phrase, and cast one flying glance round the room he had dignified by the name. True, there was a cramped make-shift kitchenette out on the landing to be added to the amenities, and a shed in the garden where Leslie was allowed to keep his easel and canvasses and colours. But, home?
“Yes,” she said, forbearing from elaborating on the glance, which had been eloquent enough. “All the evening.”
“And your husband?”
“Yes, Leslie was here, too, except for a little while, he went out about half past nine to post some letters and get a breath of air. He was in the stores packing orders all day yesterday, he needed some fresh air. But it was only for about half an hour.”
“So he was home by ten?”
“I think it was a little before. Certainly by ten.”
“And he didn’t go out again?”
“No. You can check that with him, of course,” she said disdainfully. At this very minute, if all had gone according to plan, Grocott would be asking Leslie Armiger the same questions, discreetly in the manager’s office, at Malden’s, so that the staff, no doubt already agog, shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that he was due to be arrested any moment; but Jean didn’t know that, of course. George wasn’t even sure why he had taken the precaution of arranging these two interviews to take place simultaneously; he had no reason as yet to distrust this young couple rather than any other of the possible suspects, but he had learned to respect his hunches. And if they had no lies to tell he had done them no wrong.
“We shall do that, of course,” he said disingenuously. “Tell me, Mrs. Armiger, have you had any contact with your father in-law since your marriage? Ever seen him or spoken to him?”
“No, never,” she said firmly, with a snap which said plainly that that was the way she had wanted it.
“Nor your husband, either?”
“He hasn’t seen him. He did write to him once, only once, about a couple of months ago.”
“Trying to effect a reconciliation?”
“Asking for help,” said Jean, and bit off the consonant viciously and clenched her teeth on silence.
“With your consent?”
“No!”
She wasn’t going to much trouble to hide her feelings, but she hadn’t intended to spit that negative at him so bitterly. She turned her head away for a moment, biting her lip, but she wouldn’t take it back or try to soften it now it was out.
“With what result?”
“With no result. He sent a contemptuous answer and refused to do anything for us.” She had been grateful for that, it had salved the fierce pride Leslie had involuntarily injured by making the appeal.
“And there’s been no further approach?”
“None as far as I know. But I’m sure none.”
After some inward debate George told her the terms of Armiger’s will; it seemed a justifiable line of inquiry. “Does that come as a surprise to you, Mrs. Armiger?”
“No,” she said steadily. “Why should it? He had to leave his money to someone, and he had no relatives left that be hadn’t quarrelled with.”
“You didn’t know of this plan of his to make Miss Norris his heiress?”
“All we knew was that Leslie was written off for good, so it no longer concerned us. His father had made that very plain.”
She was turning the narrow wedding ring upon her finger, and George saw that it was loose. The cheek on which the dark hair curled so lustrously was thinner than it should have been, too, perhaps with too much fatigue and worry, carrying the child, running this oppressive, cramped apology for a home and working part-time to eke out the budget; or perhaps with some other strain that gnawed at her from within. Something terrifying and destroying had happened to her when Leslie caved in and wrote to his father, something he might never be able to undo. Thanks to that unrelenting old demon of a father of his, he had another chance to come up to her expectations, if he had it in him; but after that one slip he had to prove it, up to then probably she’d been serenely sure of him. And yet George could see Leslie’s point of view, too. He must love his wife very much, or he wouldn’t have burned his boats for her sake; and to see her fretting here, to think of his son spending the first months of his life here, was surely enough to bring him to heel, however reluctantly. You could even argue that his attitude was more responsible than hers. What was certain was that by that one well-meant gesture he’d come dangerously near to shaking his marriage to pieces.
“I won’t trouble you any longer, Mrs. Armiger. Thank you for your help.”
He rose, and she went with him to the door, silent, disdaining to add anything or ask anything. Or hide anything? No, she would do that, if she had to. Maybe he’d soon know whether she was already hiding something.
The stairs were dark and narrow, the house smelled of oilcloth, stale air and furniture polish. Mrs. Harkness’s frigid gentility would never stand many visits from the police, even in plain clothes. George had already observed that no telephone wires approached the house, and that there was a telephone box only fifty yards away at the corner of the road. He drove away in the opposite direction, but turning left at the next by-road came round the block and parked under the trees within sight of the bright red cage, and sat watching it for a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes, twenty-five; but Jean Armiger didn’t come.